News International’s decision to raise the price of the Sun on Sunday is partly a result of it being seriously under-priced since launch and partly a signal of a broader strategic focus at News International and press generally

With digital revenues not scaling as publishers had hoped and with print advertising continuing its structural decline, newspaper and magazine publishers are finding success with the oldest trick in the book: increasing cover prices to drive up income

Publishers are realising that circulation decline is accelerating anyway and price increases appear to constitute only a marginal additional loss. It no longer makes sense to undervalue the product

Facebook has announced Home, an Android app that takes control of your phone, replaces the home screen with your Facebook newsfeed and relegates any competing social services to, it hopes, an afterthought.

At launch, Home will be available to at most 20% of Facebook’s mobile base. It is an interesting tool to lock in core users and drive up their engagement, but can only be part of Facebook’s mobile strategy.

Facebook has strong mobile user and revenue growth, but has not ‘won’ social on mobile as it has on the desktop, and competing services have drawn hundreds of millions of users. It is not yet clear Facebook will win, or even that there will be a single big winner.

The phone hacking scandal showed the necessary ingredients for journalistic abuses to occur. In a world of online news, greater commercial pressures mean that, if anything, they will increase

The internet will also diminish plurality among major news providers and make abuses harder to correct, increasing the need to prevent them in the first place

It is often argued that attempts to regulate the internet will either fail or be actively harmful. We argue that regulation focused on major online news providers could be a limited success

In 2003, the Competition Commission imposed the CRR remedy as a condition of the proposed merger of Carlton and Granada to allay advertiser fears that the new ITV plc would use its market power to leverage higher airtime prices on ITV1 CRR made it possible to stop the ITV1 premium from rising and yet the ITV1 premium has risen almost without a blip since 2003. This note asks why The answer it seems has less to do with the negotiating muscle of ITV Sales than with the enduring USP and relative inelasticity of demand for ITV1 airtime and demand elasticity for the rest, while CRR has become increasingly irrelevant

Digital disruption is causing the decline and fall of print media, but the new online landscape is not settled. Not all newspapers will survive the transition to digital

So far, most newspaper brands (at least in the UK) have chosen to remain free online, relying on advertising revenue. Recent announcements at the Telegraph Media Group, News International and elsewhere indicate this is changing

While a handful of global news sites that achieve huge scale could remain free, many services will have to charge consumers for access

Last month saw the fourth release of NRS PADD, a fusion of NRS and comScore data, which provides the first industry-wide, cross-platform (print and PC) data set on newspaper brand readership. It was the first release to use full year print readership data

The data is timely, as two sector-leading brands (the Daily Telegraph and the Sun) announced in late March 2013 that they would begin charging for digital access. These announcements signal a strategic shift away from a 15 year commitment to digital advertising as the sole source of digital revenues, and consequently, to digital audience scale

This report illustrates NRS PADD audience data and makes some key observations about the varying success with which newspapers have built online audiences

UK recorded music retail sales fell 8% in 2012 to £1 billion, as CD sales fell 21% to £540 million whilst digital formats rose 15% to £484 million on a huge 70% climb in subscriptions.

HMV store closures in 2013 will further dent CD sales, but accelerate the point of inflection (at least 50% digital sales) of the UK’s retail market.

The UK remains a robust source of royalties from performance of sound recordings, with PPL reporting revenues in 2011 of £153.5 million, up 7%.

Next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft, expected late this year/early next, will kick off a new cycle for the games industry, but enter a much more competitive market

Smartphones and tablets offer an alternative gaming model, with more variety, lower cost, greater convenience and, crucially, rapidly increasing sophistication

These new platforms are expanding gaming to a much larger audience, but also increasingly competing with consoles for the time and attention of core gamers. This could be the last recognisable console cycle

Sky Deutschland is reaping the benefits of its re-launch using BSkyB’s model, with an improving content offering and quality of user experience, plus a favourable environment for household consumption in Germany.

2012 results came in very close to our forecasts and we predict that Sky Deutschland will break even at EBITDA level in 2013 and turn cash flow positive in 2015.

The competitive context is benign and the horizon is clear until the next Bundesliga auction in 2016. But, in the meantime, cable, IPTV, FTA and OTT players are committed to widening their pay offers, which may put pressure on Sky’s subscriber growth and content costs.

Netflix continues to expand its global base on foundations that look slightly less shaky than a year ago as the establishment shows signs of becoming more positive to the upstart in its midst

There has been much talk of the OTT cord cutting threat to pay-TV platforms, yet the real threat lies more with certain broadcast TV channels, especially those specialising in children’s and archive entertainment series

Still, the Netflix brag that it releases the public from the managed dissatisfaction of traditional TV with instantly available drama series like House of Cards is definitely over-the-top and we anticipate niche impact in the UK